At Least 21 Girls Between 13 And 15 Get Pregnant Daily In Western Europe

More than 20 girls between 13 and 15 become pregnant every day, figures show.

Among these teenagers, pregnancies rose by 4 per cent in 2005 from the previous year, to 7,462. And more than half end in abortion.

England and Wales has the worst teenage pregnancy rates in Western Europe - six times higher than Holland and three times that of France.

And last month, ministers admitted they would not meet the 2010 target to halve teenage pregnancy rates.

There has been a reduction of only 11 per cent since 1998.

Critics blame the Government for increasing access to sex education and making contraception more freely available.

Underage girls can already get the morning-after pill from school nurses without their parents knowing.

Ministers also want it to be made available to under-16s in pharmacies.

Professor David Paton, who analysed the figures from the Department of Health, said the Government's teenage pregnancy strategy is counterproductive.

"The underlying social deprivation of an area, family breakdown rates and religion seems to have a greater effect on teenage pregnancy rates than more obvious policies such as sex education or providing access to family planning."

Professor Paton, an economist at the Nottingham University Business School, added: "There has been a tendency for the Government's teenage pregnancy strategy to focus on creating schemes where teenagers can get the morningafter pill or other forms of family planning at school or clinics.

"The danger with this sort of approach is that it can lead to an increase in risky sexual behaviour.

"There is now overwhelming evidence that such schemes are simply not effective in cutting teenage pregnancy rates.

"An improvement in general education levels appears to be the most significant factor in reducing teenage pregnancies."

According to the figures, the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham are among the worst for pregnancies among girls aged 13-15.

Other local authority areas with high rates include the West Midlands boroughs of Stoke-on-Trent, Sandwell and Wolverhampton, and Easington in County Durham, Corby in Northamptonshire, Blackpool and Kingston upon Hull.

The areas with the lowest rates include Chiltern in Buckinghamshire, Ryedale in North Yorkshire, West Devon, Brentwood in Essex, South Northamptonshire, South Shropshire, Ribble Valley in Lancashire, Uttlesford in Essex, Hart in Hampshire, Epsom and Ewell in Surrey, and Cotswold in Gloucestershire.

In the borough of Lambeth, there are 19.5 pregnancies per 1,000 girls between 13 and 15 - almost one in 50.

Schoolgirls in Lambeth are almost 18 times as likely to get pregnant while still at school than those in Chiltern.

Of the 23,556 underage conceptions in England and Wales in the last three years, a total of 13,474 were aborted.

Dr Adrian Rogers, of the pressure group Family Focus, said: "It is absolutely vital that we start to teach teenagers that having a baby is nothing like having a fashion accessory like a new handbag."

Children's minister Beverley Hughes said: "I was disappointed to see that the rate of under-16 conceptions has increased very slightly this year.

"It is important to point out there will always be fluctuations in statistical data when they are looking at relatively small numbers and I am satisfied that the overall rate for under-18s is still going down."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

She hails from Udon Thani in Thailand's Northeast, an area known as Isaan, but also known for its poverty, rice farming and beautful women that often constitute the majority of the girls working the bars in tourist haunts of Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket.

This particular teenaged Isaan girl has, by choosing to work in pornography over bars and being a mere 134 cm (4'5") tall and weighing only 32.9 kg (72.5 lbs), gained the title of 'world's smallest pornstar'.

Some basic research into the subject seems to prove that the appropriately stage named 'Thainee' with stats of 74B-54-70 (28B-21-27) is in fact the world's smallest pornstar - at least of the non-midget variety.

'They said they were going to give us ostrich eggs,' Esther Mbarga, aged 49, recalls. "'They're huge,' they said. 'Come and we'll give them to you.'" Aged ten or eleven, she and her friends had never seen an ostrich egg. They were really excited. They were taken deep into the bush and waited expectantly. Then, one at a time, they were led off to have their genitalia mutilated. Esther was pinned to the ground by four women and cut by a fifth. She limped away bleeding and crying. It was hard to walk and urination was incredibly painful for days afterwards. For some reason, the women weren't happy with the excision. On further checking they decided that there was more to cut. They cut more the following day and yet more a week later.

BRAZILIANS are hot right now in the celebrity world. And we're not talking about people who come from Brazil but, rather, that peculiar practice of waxing off the entire expanse of one's pubic hair.

It appears that Famous has compiled a dossier on the subject, listing a who's who of celebrity devotees including Jennifer Aniston.

"She may be famous for her glossy mane of hair, but it seems the 38-year-old actress is far more concerned about the hair that's growing downstairs," Famous tells.

Turns out that Jen "is neurotic about bikini waxes", booking appointments "even when there was no hair to wax" and insisting that the beauty therapist wax off "peach fuzz" because she's "phobic about extraneous, stray hairs".

Equally obsessive is Jennifer Lopez. "J.Lo once had a wax in a posh hotel in Miami and allegedly flew into a rage after discovering a stray hair in a very hard to reach place."